As a relatively layman to the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency I can not see a successful 51% attack being of any benefit to the person undertaking it. I am sorry if I miss something simple and I will happily stand corrected; but to undertake the attack you have to have in excess of 51% of the total hashing power and that is substantial in itself; I realise that GHash has been the most prominent group of servers to possibly achieve this.
Would they really do it though? They
might have considered whether becoming the biggest of the big then they may become a regulator almost by default and without knowing anyone associated with GHash then maybe they don't want to.
but the only reasons that I could see a company with the amount of money invested in hardware to have 51% of the hashing power are:
- They were compromised.
- They had found some massive flaw that would very quickly render all of their hardware worthless.
Now. There is something that might not have been considered and I regret that I am not learned enough in Bitcoin to know how and where to look. If GHash went offline would the huge drop in hashing cause anyone else to have enough of a stake to do something? Reading between the lines I understand that it is massively unlikely that it would ever happen but there is always the minute chance.